Mauthausen – Not to forget…

Post navigation

Recently I had the chance to visit the memorial of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp, in upper Austria, very close to the city of Linz.

I decided to publish my photographs from the site because they come from a place of great pain, of real human horror, all that from the recent history of Europe.

Although I prefer to shoot in color, this time color was not what I wanted to show. Color is something that does not fit to a place that lead to death about 90.000 people from 40 nations!

“Mauthausen and Gausen (a camp close to Mauthausen) were for some time the only Category III camps with the harshest conditions of confinement within the concentration camp system and one of the highest death rates in all of the concentration camps in the German Reich.”

The exterior entrance of the camp, not the main one though…

The exterior entrance from inside…

Mauthausen Camp was finished at 1941

“Almost 190.000 people were deported to Mauthausen between construction of the camp in August 1938 and its liberation by the US Army in May 1945”

Camp’s main gate

Wooden buildings to keep the prisoners

“The political function of the camp, the constant persecution and detention of real or supposed political and ideological opponents, took priority until 1943”

In small rooms many prisoners had to live in terrible conditions…

High granite walls with electric wires on top made escape almost impossible…

“Thousands of prisoners were beaten to death, shot, murdered by lethal injection, or froze to death.”

“At least 10.200 prisoners were murdered in the gas chamber at the main camp, in Gusen, or at Hartheim Castle and in the gas van that traveled between Mauthausen and Gusen.”

The gas chamber of Mauthausen

The gas chamber’s airtight door

Human ovens

“At least 90.000 inmates died in Mauthausen, Gusen and the satellite camps, half of them in the last four months before the camps were liberated”

“In the early 1960, a cemetery was installed inside the Mauthausen Memorial and the remains of concentration camp victims were subsequently transferred there from the American cemeteries in Mauthausen and Gusen and from the SS mass graves. More than 14.000 victims were buried in camp II and the area of inmate barracks 16 to 19.”

The memorial’s chapel

For humanity to remember and never see something like that again!

(Quotes from the Mauthausen Memorial leaflet, as this is distributed to all visitors of the site.)